


Best Laid Plans and Tables

by Tenthsun



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 08:02:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2302439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenthsun/pseuds/Tenthsun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft Holmes has lived too long in a world of pre-planned menus and perfectly executed time tables. Time to mix things up a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Best Laid Plans and Tables

**Author's Note:**

> I just thought it was about time Mycroft finally got some…All right that was crass! However, the point remains. Time to let Mycroft indulge!

  1.     ** _Mycroft Holmes is fitter than he looks._**



Although he’s tall and in reasonably – well plausibly, anyway – good health, he has all the rugged appeal of a librarian. Yes, he does wear pinstriped 3-piece suits with a pocket watch chain no less, but he’s not fat enough to be mistaken for a banker – anymore. And yes, his ginger-tinted chestnut brown hairline is staging a retreat but he has yet to resort to a comb over. It’s anyone’s guess whether he will eventually throw in the towel and start camouflaging the loss. The current consensus in his office, however, is on him letting it thin gracefully with maturing dignity. But a maverick few – those who’d been passed over for promotion to his personal team – insist that the Ice Man’s legendary reserve will finally snap and he – or more likely his assistant Anthea – will quietly schedule appointments with a discreet dermatologist for hair transplants. No one really pays them any mind.

Yes, Mycroft Holmes looks as rugged as one’s maths professor at uni - which is why it’s such a shock when he suddenly grabs her, lifts her up, and presses her back until she lies flat on the gleaming, lacquered wood of the dining room table. He doesn’t break a sweat. He doesn’t even have to breathe very hard. The fine wool fabric of his trousers slides against the sheer nylon of her stockings. Somehow she’s lost her shoes. And she couldn’t move even if she wanted to. He’s certainly not going to let her.

2\. **_Mycroft Holmes is a greedy man_** _._

Yes, he has everything – everything material, that is – that a man of his admittedly moderate temperament and tastes could want.  If one were to be crass about it, he has all the accoutrements that a man of power – REAL power, not that celebrity nonsense fed to the masses – has.  His car is top of the line, with the requisite chauffer and the inclusion of certain features available only to the assassination-wary political class. His suits are all Saville Row, his ties are Turnbull and Asser and his shoes handmade.  His financial portfolio bulges with the results of his own prescience in spotting future economic shifts.

More importantly, for some time, he has occupied Quartermaster House in London’s St. Basil Square.  Built in the 19th century by a Holmes cousin who’d made his fortune in the Napoleonic Wars commanding his ship under Admiral Nelson, it is a subsidiary property of the Holmes family estate. It is centrally located, beautifully kept, and discreetly reeks of old money.  True, he leases it from the current owner, Viscount Sherringford Holmes, his second cousin once removed. However, some years ago he’d convinced his cousin to allow him the purchase of Roseholme Manor, a lush little property renowned for its rose gardens and treasured as his childhood home. Since the family seat was actually Holderby Park and Mycroft had crafted the financial strategy that had helped Sherringford save it, the Viscount could hardly refuse to part with Roseholme now could he? So convincing his cousin to eventually part with Quartermaster House one day should be child’s play.

He currently leases Roseholme for a satisfyingly exorbitant fee to a Qatarian Emir whose status as trade representative to the British government prevents Mycroft from taking personal advantage of the man’s connections to Qatar’s insanely lucrative natural gas industry. It does NOT however prevent the grateful Emir from introducing him to his Ghanaian associates who are more than eager to exploit Mycroft’s talents in long-term strategic geo-political forecasting to help manage their own burgeoning oil industry. Since they have no ties to Whitehall or No. 10 Downing Street, Mycroft was happy to oblige. His banker and broker were even happier.

Yes, describing his mental gift is a mouthful. Explaining the shadowy yet powerful role it gives him is even harder to do, not to mention trying to place it within the convoluted, interconnecting hierarchies of British intelligence, the Cabinet, and the Royal Household. However it doesn’t stop him from taking advantage of all the perks that come with it.

Although the Holmes family has a centuries-long track record of esteemed service to the crown, the family history is riddled with cycles of boom and bust. For every sharp-witted, gimlet-eyed specimen like Mycroft, there have been as many mad geniuses – or simply mad – dreamers-cum-adventurers like his brother Sherlock or bumbling, ineffectual country squires like Sherringford. The grand aristocratic tradition of always making sure one had a spare to go along with the heir usually gave each generation or the ones just ahead or behind it a Mycroft type to balance the destructive tendencies of the previous two. Modern birth control has lessened the frequency of a spare, so Mycroft has had to make do where he could.

He kept a sharp eye on opportunity whenever it arose, if only to keep Holderby Park free from tourists. After all, one had to keep up appearances. But he certainly wasn’t afraid to look out for himself or his wayward brother. He was the first to admit that, despite his habitually abstemious ways – with the exception of the pudginess of his childhood and his achingly awkward adolescence – he had a fine appreciation for abundance in all its forms.

Which perhaps explained why his hands – his immaculately manicured hands – were stroking tenderly along the curve of her breasts, sliding beneath the silk and lace of her bra, deftly undoing the clasp, then delicately tracing the surface of one nipple as he greedily suckled at the other.

  1.    **_Mycroft Holmes is a starving man._**



His cook, a holdover from his childhood at Roseholme, keeps him well fed as evidenced by this evening’s menu. A succulent entrée of roast duck served with apples and had been laid out before him on the best china placed upon the Irish linen tablecloth with the Valenciennes lace edge and accented by the silver candlesticks. The setting had been for two. How cook knew to serve his favorite meal would bear investigating. Later.

When he was younger, the diet doctors had worked hard to get him to perceive the difference between his physical hunger and his emotional hunger. They’d devised a comprehensive regime of diet, exercise and stress management techniques to replace sugar and stodge with fruits and vegetables, replace lounging in the library with long, bracing walks, and replace chronic, low-level anxiety with deep breathing, positive thoughts and more emotional openness. They’d had him until they’d included the “emotional openness.” No Holmes had been emotionally open since the Tudor regime.  Mycroft had snatched up the physician’s health plan with an icy sneer, jettisoned that last item, and grimly worked at the rest until, by the time he’d started university he’d gotten himself down to a respectable, even slim weight.  It was only later, as he’d climbed the ladder of his ruthless profession, did he realize that when it came to stress the doctors might have had a point. The crazy hours, the high-risk stakes and the frankly hair-raising near-misses he coped with on a daily basis had seen him diving into the cream buns on more than one occasion.  Something had to be done.

Anthea, or more correctly her Argentinian physician father, had gotten him the pills. Those glorious, blessed pills! Finally he could face a day without having to worry about hunger pain or his waistline. They were gold for when his self-control slipped and he found himself reaching for another helping.  Funnily enough, however, the defeat of his lifelong weight problem had left him realizing he was hungry for other things.

 _Like_ _touch_.

His palms slid down the expanse of her bare skin. She was soft, pliant and quivering to the touch.

 _Like **desire**_.

His first sight of her had left him light-headed. He felt dizzy not only at the thought that some jumped up little accountant had had the nerve to question Mycroft’s (technically Anthea’s) requisition forms but also at the fact that _she_ was the accountant.  

Despite his proximity to the throne, Mycroft was not, nor had he ever been, a royalty buff. He was resolutely NOT susceptible to worshipping ANYTHING whether it be a divine monarch or a temporal one. He knew firsthand just how much blood had to be spilt in order to hold a crown – even in this day and age, surprisingly – which put to rest any romantic royalist notions before they could even take root. None of which stopped him from blatantly adoring the – yes, if only in the secure privacy of his own mind, he admitted it – heavenly body beneath him.

She was tall, nearly as tall as he was in her heels which she’d somehow managed to lose in their “skirmish”. Her lithe height added delicious length to the legs that smoothly parted to wrap around him before he impatiently pulled them higher. Despite her height she had curves he could feel, a fact he relished by sliding one hand up from a distinctly rounded hip to stroke the sweet indentation of her waist.

She was blonde, a bit ironic that, for, from the purely aesthetic sense he’d always preferred brunettes. On the rare occasions when he’d joined in the illicit pleasures that capped a particularly arduous foreign visit, the woman he selected always had dark hair. Whether that said something about suppressed feelings for his assistant or even more deeply buried feelings about his mother he refused to examine.

She wasn’t pale. Her skin – not quite English cream but subtler, deeper somehow - had the rose and gold flush not just of desire but of good health and extended excursions outdoors. He wondered what she did? Riding? Hunting? Hiking? Rowing? Swimming, yes, he could imagine that. She was quite fit without being harshly sculpted. Her lines were clear, clean but soft. A rococo sculpture rather than a baroque, a Monet rather than a Michelangelo.    

Words had died in his throat when he first saw her. If someone had taken a pre-Monaco Princess Grace and stretched her along the late Princess of Wales’ frame you could describe her almost perfectly. Yes it was an egregiously starry-eyed description. But it was also damningly accurate. The length of her legs made his mouth go dry. The rest of her made his mouth water. He’d had to exert tremendous effort to refocus his mind on the current confrontation and not on wondering how quickly he could undo the buttons on her blouse.  He’d had to keep his traitorous hands clasped to still their shaking.  And he’d had to dedicate a whole portion of his vast mind to visualizing a cold shower to halt the sudden expansion of a certain part of his anatomy.

It was revolting, the knowledge, the realization that he could be so…common, that there was someone, that there was a woman whose mere presence could send his thoughts sputtering straight into the gutter.  

He’d betrayed only the slightest hesitation, a mere fraction of a second, but even that little pause was enough for those in the know to conclude the Ice Man had been shaken. By a woman no less. He likes to think he’d recovered beautifully. With “perfectly weaponized politeness” he’d calmly asked on whose authority she’d dared to question his requests. She’d told him with equally cold courtesy and his eyebrows had climbed skyward. Ah. She was protected then. He’d had to change his tactics on the fly, nothing he wasn’t called upon to do daily – not however when he was at such a disadvantage.

He’d returned to his office in possession of only half of what he’d wanted and forced to concede that she’d won that round. In addition, he’d castigated himself for the crassness of his thoughts not to mention his physical reactions. He was Mycroft Holmes, damn it! NOTHING distracted him from an objective – not even his own base desires. The body was just transport. He’d told Sherlock that over and over. He was not going to prove himself wrong.

Unfortunately, logic, pride, and determination are all lost on a starving man.

Which is why he currently found himself with his head buried between her thighs as she arched into him with hitched, breathless cries that only made him redouble his efforts.

He was not ashamed that he’d used work matters to manipulate her into coming to his home. Nor was he ashamed that he’d – discreetly – propositioned her. (He’d dutifully allow Anthea to read him the riot act later.) There’d been no coercion, no quid pro quo. He was in no way, shape or form her superior in the hierarchy. He had blocked no exits, curtailed any transportation, nor prevented her from getting to any of the landlines or cell phones. He’d made it clear she was free to stay or leave as she’d like and if requested his driver would take her anywhere she wished to go.

Apparently she hadn’t wished to go.

One day he would have to ask her why she hadn’t wished to go.

One day he’d have to ask her why him in a government of THOUSANDS of directors and operatives and field agents who were – he begrudgingly had to admit – younger, fitter, handsomer.

For now however his mind could only handle one action at a time, in linear sequence as each gesture resounded in his psyche like an exploding star. Fingers brushed against each other as he’d passed the wine glass had led to more touches and then to intertwined fingers and then to a kiss that he’d meant to remain chaste but deepened into something much more demanding.  While one part of his mind was reveling in using machinery that had been left offline for FAR too long, another part was frantically screaming danger, danger! He’d thought to silence the alarm by staging a tactical retreat into the dining room for dinner and a little breathing room.

His body had had other ideas.

And rather than the lovely entrée cook had prepared, he found himself feasting on the infinitely more satisfying taste of a woman.

It had been quite a while since he’d last gorged himself. He had every intention of making this binge eating episode last as long as possible.

Best not to tell cook about the menu substitution.

  **-Fin-**

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The phrase “perfectly weaponized politeness” is not my own. Another author created it in relation to Mycroft. I couldn't remember the title but mushroombodygardens-and-clockwork was sweet enough to find it for me (thank you!). This phrase comes from the story "It's Going to Take a Lot to Drag Me Away From You" which can be found here: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/14213.html?thread=87153541#t87153541. Unfortunately, the author is anonymous so I can't name check them. Sorry! But I plan to reread this story...
> 
> P.S. if author out there is reading this, please let me know and I'll give you credit for that lovely phrase.


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